Comment #2, Trip #1

Well, here I am. It's about 12:45am on Sunday. (Happy Father's day to me) Which is 3:45pm on Saturday back home. I'm not sure why exactly I'm awake. It's not really morning anywhere related to me... but here I am.

Anyway, I thought I'd take a little time and go into more details as to our first day in Russia. Plus, I'm sort of a prisoner to the hotel room until my clothes dry off.

This is all so.... foreign! (Appropriate word choice) I've been out of the country a few times in my life, but most the time it is to places that are touristy enough that you can still fake your way around. I'm telling you Moscow is something else. (I can't image how much more so it'll be in Novokuznetsk).

As I mentioned before, our bags did not make it here yet - so we spent well over an hour screwing around with that whole thing. Thank GOD that the representative from our agency was still there to great us. It was pretty cool, when we did finally come out of customs and baggage there was a women holding a sign (in English) with our agency name on it. (Soon I'll be coming out with the name of our agency). As of right now, I have nothing but praise for our agency. They're not a huge agency - But they get stuff done! Obviously, they do - otherwise I wouldn't be here right now.

Anyway, the driving in Moscow is a bit more aggressive than Omaha, but I didn't think it was anything out of control. I've been in Boston during rush hour and believe me, Boston is WAY scarier.

I wanted to talk a bit more about Vladimir. One of the first things that we had to do was to hand over some important documents as well as some money to "a man named Vladimir". This made me a little nervous before the trip. Who is this guy named Vladmir? What if we give it to the wrong guy?

Well, let me tell you: Vladimir is the nicest guy in the world. Yes, we all have used that phrase before, but this guy really is. So now we know: The nicest guy in the world is from Russia. As we stepped into his 10'-14' office, we were greeted with two walls full of children's pictures. One wall was entirely of infants and toddlers. Those were all the babies that have been adopted out by his agency in the past 14 years. The other wall was entirely filled with pictures of beautiful young children and even some older ones. These were the pictures of the same children as they were growing up.

"You see" he said. "I have one requirement during this whole process". You must send me one picture each year of the children as they grow up. That is fair, yes?"

I can't tell you how cool it was to see the faces of all those children. Yesterday's traveling was quite the adventure and it was easy to loose sight as to why we're really here. Our time in Vladimir's office brought us back to focus and made all the fatigue and stress go away.

We walked out of his office with huge smiles on our faces.

After that, we had dinner at a nice Russian place across from our hotel. (By the way, Russian food is very good near as I can tell. Once again, we'll find out how authentic everything is after we arrive in Novokuznetsk)

OK - I'm tired again. I'm going to try to go back to sleep. More to come later.